The Queue: The Twitcave
by Alex Ziebart 
Aug 26th 2009 at 5:00PM
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.Today I did something a little different for our questions and I went to Twitter. My first day really back on the job since BlizzCon, I was in the mood for some quick and easy questions. On a completely related note, yes, I did have Hawaiian Pizza at BlizzCon. How could I not?
LOLNAIDERS asked...
"Do you think Worgen racials are as stupidly overpowered as everyone's complaining about?"
I'm going to argue semantics a little bit. Yes, I think the racials are very cool and exciting, probably more fun than any of the other racials currently in game. I don't think they're overpowered. Well, the various speed boosts might be pretty wild in the arena, but we already have some crazy PvP racials in the game. I'm quite fond of Every Man.
They did mention at BlizzCon that they want racials to be a little more fun, so I think most races will end up with things on par with what the Worgen/Goblins have in the end. That's my hope, anyway.
Fraseringermany asked...
"Can I live in Europe and legally have a US account and play on a US server?"
As far as I know, that's perfectly fine. I don't believe there are any regional restrictions like that. We have a few people on our staff that do it already, and I'm in the US and considering an EU account. There's nothing stopping you from doing it.
cdmerchant asked...
"Who is Dan Jolley? Apparently he has a lot of galleries at WoW.com."
Our galleries are haunted. Once upon a time we accidentally created two Dan Jolley galleries rather than just the one we needed for an article. We decided to delete one of them, but that apparently caused the slighted gallery up for deletion to become enraged. As we murdered it in cold blood, it swore vengeance against our cruel, unfeeling hands and cursed us to a thousand years of pain and horror. Ever since then, the ghost of Dan Jolley's gallery has haunted all of our other galleries, and we can't get the name off of the title bar. We've tried and tried, but it has infected them all. I'm not sure how much it has actually been looked into, but even our site's developers look at it and go, "What the hell?"
Overall its pretty harmless since it's only on the low-res versions of the pictures, not the hi-res versions or the galleries themselves, so we're not dying to get it fixed. It's annoying, but it's also funny. Maybe it'll go away eventually, or we'll be in a wonderful situation where something like that is all we have to worry about. Then we'll get it fixed.
Update: Never mind. I fixed it. Because I rule.
kimptoc asked...
"Can I get the new chest with XP heirloom without doing epic dungeons?"
Yep! Once you've reached the Crusader rank at the Argent Tournament, you can use the Champion's Seals you've been getting to buy heirlooms. The new chest pieces will cost you 60 Champion's Seals. You don't need to run a single dungeon to get those, just do a lot of daily quests.
benfraley asked...
"Any ideas on what's going to happen to Outland and Northrend in the expansion? Will they just become ghost towns?"
The awesome "For the Horde!" kid at BlizzCon asked something like this. Essentially, will the Cataclysm have any impact on these areas. The answer was that Northrend will be impacted a little, but not quite as much as the rest of the world. The Cataclsym won't bother Outland since it's a uniquely Azerothian event, though they will comb over the Outland quests to make the leveling experience better.
I don't think Outland will be any more of a ghost town than it already is. Do people still hang out there? Once you've leveled through it, you bail for Northrend. That won't change.
Cadistra asked...
"Do we have to get The Explorer title now, while the world's still whole? Or will it be altered for all the new terrain or lack thereof?"
It was very briefly mentioned at BlizzCon that many of the "old world" achievements will be updated to reflect the events of Cataclysm. I would guess that this is one of those achievements. I can't promise that, however. They might decide to make this one of the achievements that becomes a Feat of Strength or something like that. Keep this question in mind, and ask us again once Cataclysm hits beta. We won't know for sure until then.
A lot of people asked...
"What did you like best out of BlizzCon this year?"
This will sound incredibly corny, but the WoW.com meetup was my favorite part. It exceeded all of our expectations, almost to the point of absurdity. Last year we had somewhere between 150 and 300 attendees at our meetup. Our site has grown since last year, so we were expecting between 300 and 500 attendees. In reality, the number was between 1,250 and 1,500 with the cast of The Guild among them. We definitely did not plan for something like that, but we'll be sure to do so next year. On top of that, we had, at its peak, 2,000 people watching live from our little thrown-together laptop camera stream from their own homes and probably around 6,000 people checked it out throughout the night. For awhile there, we were in a state of utter disbelief. We were totally blown away.
It meant a lot to all of us that so many people would come out in person just to hang out with the WoW.com crew. Having so many people there made it really hard to meet everyone that wanted to talk to us (and very hard to do some of the other things we had planned), but the whole thing still made us very happy and very proud.
If using that as my answer is cheating, then my favorite part of BlizzCon was hearing Chris Metzen do some of his StarCraft/Warcraft voices. My little fanboy heart was all aflutter.
Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW.com crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column! Leave your questions in the comments and we'll do our best to answer 'em!Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, BlizzCon, The Queue, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 6)
Eddie Aug 26th 2009 5:08PM
Man that picture made my mouth water.. havent eaten all day. /sigh and a little /cry
Alanid Aug 26th 2009 5:15PM
Frikkin high five man. That pizza looks delicious... CURSE YOU WoWINSIDER!!
Barinthos Aug 26th 2009 5:27PM
I thought the same damn thing as soon as I saw that....i'm starving!
Saint Aug 26th 2009 5:44PM
Starvation before pineapple on a pizza.
Working for Papa John's for years I always turned down Pineapple pizzas. Unhappy customer returned the pizza and the crew gets to chow down on it? Pineapple? I SHALL PASS.
And don't get me wrong. I love pineapple. Just not with tomato sauce, crust, and mozzarella.
Barinthos Aug 26th 2009 6:02PM
I thought the same thing when I first saw one...it looked just wrong and pizza blasphemy. But it's quite tasty. The zest from the pineapple and the ham just go well together.
Saint Aug 26th 2009 6:12PM
I was the opposite actually. First time I saw one I was ready to devour. Half a piece later I threw down the flag and started picking pineapples off the slice. The taste still remained, but I could deal with that. The two flavors just don't work for me.
The worst part about any kind of fruit bit on a pizza, be it a tomato slice or a pineapple chunk, is that the center of that fruit is still going to be 200 degrees when the rest of the slice has cooled to room temperature. Everything is going fine. The slice is hot, but in a good way. Then chomp! Molten juice in your mouth.
Wellsee Aug 26th 2009 6:13PM
My favorite pizza involves pineapple... and onion and jalepenos! The sweet and the spice go sooo well together. As an added benefit, everyone looks at me as if I was eating a corpse, so I get the whole thing for myself!
Eddie Aug 26th 2009 7:05PM
Wow that hot pinapple onion pizza sounds good too. I'll have to try that out some time. :)
Jamie Aug 26th 2009 9:10PM
I just came back from eating a huuuge pizza (meatballs, red bell peppers & onion) managed 6/8 slices of this 14" beast, I saw this topic and almost heaved it all up!!!
Von Franko Aug 27th 2009 2:30PM
Hawaiian Pizza was my lunch both days at the little "pizza by the slice" place a block down the street from the con. Much cheaper to eat there and quick to get food.
Elmo Aug 26th 2009 5:08PM
I knew it, I have to do Loremaster now and get extra e-peen when the expansion hits.
thats right vote me down :
slartibart Aug 26th 2009 5:20PM
I won't vote you down, makes me so glad I went ahead and finished loremaster earlier this summer.
Since my play time is sporadic lately, I think I'm going to focus on some rep grinds (potentially disappearing) in lieu of raiding.
Gessilea Aug 26th 2009 5:42PM
I've actually been working on Loremaster myself. I think everyone should do at least an Explorer before the xpac comes out. One last hurrah to the old Azeroth!
Seriously though, doing Loremaster has made it terrifically clear that the quests and zones implemented in Wrath and BC are FAR better designed than a lot of those in the old world. For example! I just did Desolace (shudder). There are a bunch of random quest givers with one or two quests each who are pretty much impossible to find if you're not following a guide or stumble over them on accident. The main quest hub and only flight path (for alliance) is at the top of the zone but much of the questing is in the bottom third. And in the middle of a four quest chain, I get sent to Swamp of Sorrows. What? Did they draw a line on the map and find the single most random, far away zone?
I hope Desolace gets smashed by a freaking volcano in Cataclysm, I really do.
/rant
Mike Aug 26th 2009 5:59PM
@Gessilea: Parts of Desolace will now be lush green forests. New islands will emerge along the coastline.
They showed a few before & after shots of the zone during Blizzcon.
Gessilea Aug 26th 2009 6:17PM
@Mike: Not quite as satisfying as a volcano, alas.
Croe Aug 26th 2009 6:19PM
That was one of my first thoughts. How will it affect Loremaster? Personally, that was one of my favourite achievements. I found that by being able to do all the quests quickly, you were able to follow the story line and lore much more easily and enjoy it. The problem with Vanilla WoW was that it took so long to do the quests and there were so many distraction along the way that you lost the thread. Also, if you didn't play any of the Warcraft games, you lost of lot of the references.
Personally, I'd recommend everyone try to complete as many quests as they can before the XP comes out. Who knows if you'll be able to do them again.
Jabadabadana Aug 26th 2009 6:27PM
See, I'm the exact opposite, working on Loremaster reminds me that the designers gave a crap back during vanilla. The whole world feels much cooler, and more thought out than the linear, symmetrical grinding that is Outland. WotlK is a bit better than outland, but only due to things like phasing. I'm starting to be convinced that Cataclysm is being worked on by the C department in regards to lore.
(I also think they blew the world up in order to not have to draw a lot of the dead spaces in certain zones. But that may just be me.)
The Exiled Warlock Aug 26th 2009 7:11PM
Jab, I think you've stumbled upon the MMO creators (and dare Is say, game creators, in general) dilemma. To create an organic and natural feeling world, where quests don't neccesary seem like a mechanism as much as they do an actual quest, OR to create a smooth and enjoyable gaming experience. Certainly some developers will always lean to one or the other (Oblivion, other than alot of it being very empty, feels much like a real world. Fable II is very stream lined, but still open. Mario is a straight line.)
To be honest, I'm not sure which I really prefer. A little of column A, a little of column B perhaps. I'd like to see things in the old world tuned a bit (drop rates perhaps), but some of the world wide discover-exactly-whats-going-down quests do feel like they have a place at times. *shrug*
PvtDeth Aug 27th 2009 7:04AM
@ Jab
I agree that Outland questing was a bit linear and dull. I don't see how you can say the only interesting thing about Wrath questing is phasing. The write talks about the back and forth globetrotting in classic. This was put in not to increase your enjoyment of the game, but somply to delay your progress. I immensely enjoyed quests like the one to get Verigan's Fist for Paladins, but quest that send you from Stormwind to Thousand Needles and back simply for a few silver and a normal amount of experience are not only frustrating but very poor game design.
This is the same philosophy behind limiting access to mounts and making people wait for boats at specific ports. (Remember 1000g epic mounts?) The longer it takes to get to 60, the less chance someone will get bored waiting for the next content patch and quit. Now that 60 isn't the cap, mounts are cheaper and can be bought sooner, heirlooms, RaF, xp requirement reductions, quest xp values doubling.
As WoW has grown into a much larger enterprise with much greater resources, there's no longer a need to hold people back as long as possible. Leveling isn't the main experience in Northrend, endgame is. For Cataclysm the pendulum will swing the other way a bit and leveling will get more emphasis, hence the 5 level increase as opposed to 10. All indications point to 5 big levels as opposed to 10 smaller ones.
Nazgûl Aug 26th 2009 5:10PM
You sure do rule, Alex.